Week 5. Jacksonian America

Outline

Industrialization
agriculture (cotton gin, steel plow, western settlement, low land prices)
transportation (roads, railroads, canals (Erie canal), steamboats, ocean steamships)
state and federal governments helped and directed development of transportation routes
inventions changed ways of life (steam engine, telegraph, sewing machine)
growth of cities along transporation routes (3 percent in 1790 to 16 percent in 1860)
local, then national labor unions got Jackson to institute 10-hour workday (1836)

Immigration
1845-1854 2.4 million immigrants or 14.5 percent of total population in 1845
mostly the Irish (poor farmers, unskilled) and Germans (independent farmers, skilled, professionals)
also Swedes, Norwegians, and Chinese (in California after 1854)
nativism - movement against the foreign-born and Catholics - was a reaction to immigration

"The Cotton Mills at Lowell, Massachusetts," 1852
manufacturing developed in New England faster than elsewhere in America
Lowell founders attempted to make republicanism compatible with industrialization
machine spinning and weaving
young single women workers
long working hours (13 hours a day, 6 days a week)
at first in the countryside, good wages, and education
soon conditions deteriorated
most factories built tenement towns and employed immigrants

Popular Culture
emergence of (urban) leisure
drinking, gambling, horse races
cockfighting, dogfighting, prizefighting (bare knuckles)
theater served all classes, included Shakespeare, opera, and minstrel shows on the same program
audiences often interacted with actors (threw tomatoes, requested numbers)
minstrel shows (white actors imitating blacks, performing songs, dance, and jokes)
male middle-class, working-class, and immigrant audiences

"Long Time Ago Negro Song . . . As sung by M.T. Rice in the Ethiopian Opera." 1833
one of a few genuine African-American tunes from before the Civil War
performed by white artist, Thomas "Daddy" Rice
this piece of sheet music was sold as Rice's song, not as an African-American song
picture shows Rice in blackface costume
the melody is still performed as harmonized by Aaron Copeland in 1939

Religion
Deism (rationalist, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson)
Unitarianism (Boston elite, salvation is possible for all)
Universalism (wage laborers, salvation is possible for all)

Second Great Awakening:
democratic beliefs and worship practices (included blacks and lower classes, uneducated clergy)
emotional rituals (camp meetings)
salvation is possible for all
idea of social equality (influenced abolitionism)
begain in the frontier in 1800s, then spread everywhere (New England 1830-1831)
Baptists (ritual of adult baptism)
Methodists (more centralized)
Erie Canal area became the "burned over district" because of repeated revivals
related to the market revolution
Presbyterians (individual can choose salvation, Charles Grandison Finney in Rochester)
Mormons (Latter-day Saints, anti-materialist, polygamy, migrated from New York to Illinois to Utah)
Millerites (emphazised the impending coming of Christ and the end of the world)
this area also contained experimental, utopian communities

Reform Movements
influenced by the Second Great Awakening
also influenced by Transcendentalism (a romantic belief in the ability of the mind to transcend the limits of rational thinking, Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson)
mostly women participated
temperance movement (reduced consumption of alcohol)
prison and asylums movement (rehabilitation instead of punishment)
abolitionism (against slavery)
women's rights (education, cult of domesticity & woman's sphere vs. entering the professions, control over property, suffrage)

Utopian communities
more than a hundred between 1800 and 1900
religious and secular
most were short-lived
Shakers (began in New York State, religious, all property in common, celibacy & separation of the sexes, farming)
Oneida Community (New York, religious, group marriage, eugenics, manufactured traps, silverware)
New Harmony (Indiana, cooperative community, education, failed economically)
Brook Farm (New England, intellectuals like Thoreau and writer Nathaniel Hawthorne participated, intellectual debate and plain living, maintained a community school)